A question for every household in Newburgh — A Public Art Installation, Fall 2027 photo © Newburgh Is America Two generations ago, a large swath of properties in the downtown area of Newburgh was declared “blighted”. The legal designation encompassed properties “with or without tangible physical blight.” This mechanism set in motion the clearance of […]
HONOR or OBLIGATION
Banners Over Our Streets, or Roofs Over Their Heads? Part Three — What honor looks like when it costs something EDITING The clearing. Banners over roads, or roofs over their heads? For two installments I argued … […]
Honor or Obligation
Part 2: Whose Speech? The argument as I imagine a court might hear it The thorny thicket. Yesterday I made the citizen’s case: that a program in which the City chooses whose service to honor on the public way cannot be the neutral tribute it claims to be. The City will not answer that as […]
Honor and Obligation
Part 1: Whose Hero? What the Hometown Heroes campaign asks a city to decide Today I wade into a thorny thicket. There is a clearing on the other side. With any luck I’ll get there unscathed. photograph © NIA Photograph and image manipulation: Michael Lebron © NIA A Newburgh council member has proposed that the […]
Where Broadway Flows
The Planning Board rules on “2 Washington Street“ The “2 Washington Street” site, looking toward the Hudson. Photo, © NIA It’s late Tuesday afternoon. I am at my home office, struggling with my latest essay with the working title “Architecture, Authoritarianism and Democracy”. It is the densest thing I have written since I started writing […]
The Leyland Proposal
It was the winter of 2007. I got a letter in the mail. It was from an oil and gas company. But not one that I had ever heard of. It said that there was a large reservoir of natural gas under the 1875 farmhouse plus 7 acres of land that my wife and I […]
The Grounding
Author’s note: I am not a lawyer. The following does not constitute legal advice. It is a brief in support of a proposition. The Return describes an operable remedy to urban renewal. The Grounding describes an executable, doctrinal path that enables it. The chartered covenant proposed in The Return rests on constitutional building blocks that […]
The Return
“Some men see things as they are and ask why; I dream things that never were and ask why not?” — Robert Kennedy, March 18, 1968 The trilogy named the problem. We Know Who You Are Working For, Reparations: The Preferential Rental Option for the Displaced, and The Holding described, in three different registers, the […]
The Holding
Image distributed by the developer. Third in a series, after “We Know Who You Are Working For” and “Reparations: ‘The Preferential Rental Option for the Displaced’” A developer has filed an application with the City of Newburgh to build a 172-unit market-rate residential and office complex on ten acres of waterfront ground south of Washington […]
Reparations: “The Preferential Rental Option for the Displaced”*
What Kearney’s Plan Actually Offers, and What Was Actually Taken At the Newburgh city council work meeting of April 23, a representative of Kearney Realty & Development Group announced what the developer called the “first in the nation” right-to-return policy for descendants of people displaced by Newburgh’s urban renewal program.1 Twenty percent of units at […]
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